Opening India’s Garments Sector to South Asia

This paper examines the competitiveness of the Indian garments industry vis-à-vis the other South Asian countries Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Under the SAFTA agreement, many of the garment items were on India’s sensitive lists and did not face concessional treatment. Though many of the items have been subsequently removed from India’s sensitive list, the imports of these items to India have not increased significantly. The paper uses secondary data to examine the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) of the four South Asian countries and finds that they are not competing internationally in the same segment of the garments sector. The imports of India in garments from each of these countries are concentrated in a few products. The paper uses a primary survey on five garments clusters in India to understand the nature of imports of garments from these countries and the effect of removal of these items from India’s sensitive list on its imports. URL:[http://fgks.in/IndexServer/tifac/article/143.pdf].